Automating the world one-liner at a time…
As Microsoft has shifted towards a more customer-oriented culture, Microsoft engineers are using social networks, tech communities and direct customer feedback as an integral part on how we make decisions about future investments. A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems.
SSH solutions are available today by a number of vendors and communities, especially in the Linux world. However, there are limited implementations customers can deploy in Windows production environments. After reviewing these alternatives, the PowerShell team realized the best option will be for our team to adopt an industry proven solution while providing tight integration with Windows; a solution that Microsoft will deliver in Windows while working closely with subject matter experts across the planet to build it. Based on these goals, I’m pleased to announce that the PowerShell team will support and contribute to the OpenSSH community - Very excited to work with the OpenSSH community to deliver the PowerShell and Windows SSH solution!
A follow up question the reader might have is When and How will the SSH support be available? The team is in the early planning phase, and there’re not exact days yet. However the PowerShell team will provide details in the near future on availability dates.
Finally, I'd like to share some background on today’s announcement, because this is the 3rd time the PowerShell team has attempted to support SSH. The first attempts were during PowerShell V1 and V2 and were rejected. Given our changes in leadership and culture, we decided to give it another try and this time, because we are able to show the clear and compelling customer value, the company is very supportive. So I want to take a minute and thank all of you in the community who have been clearly and articulately making the case for why and how we should support SSH! Your voices matter and we do listen.
Thank you!
Angel CalvoGroup Software Engineering ManagerPowerShell Team
Additional Information
For more information on SSH please go to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4251.txt
For information on OpenSSH go to: http://www.openssh.com/index.html
Hopefully this means that Microsoft will be sponsoring OpenBSD development, which maintains the OpenSSH project:
www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2015.html
www.openbsd.org/donations.html
Excellent news! I've been waiting and asking for ssh support for years ;-)
Thank you very much!
Hell... it's about time!
www.youtube.com/watch
It seems that more and more exciting changes are occurring at Microsoft every day. I can't wait to see where this all goes.
Looking all over for the Like button!
It is a good news that Microsoft opened their views and doors to the world and *nix community.
Just to remind those in Microsoft, please remember to implement the SSH in the industry standard way, don't try to come up your own SSH implementation/protocol standards and skew or confuse people who are using SSH!!!
Do NOT repeat what you guys did in Internet Explorer with messing up HTTP/HTML standards that come with some non-standard, HTML pages/language that only IE can understand!
Finally! These are great news!
Finally, awesome!
{quote}
... both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa ...
This to me, sounds like there will be sshd daemon side as well? Will there be some sort of PAM_sshd to bridge to login to AD based? Or certs based only via ssh-copy-id? Though it may be outside the PowerShell issue, please also consider some sort of MTA (both AWS and Google Compute has them) for login (pam_google_authenticator on Windows may be a great way).
If it is indeed going to be part of OpenSSH, this would also mean you'll be supporting port-forwarding on both sshd and ssh client side, correct? Sometimes using "-L" and "-D" options on ssh client comes in quite handy to determine issues of firewalls, proxy, etc.
Last but not least, hopefully, it'll be library accessible, so we can also write deployment tools and even MSI CustomAction.
Once again, thank you very much!
I got goosebumps in anticipation when reading this. :-)
Great news!
Will SFTP support be part of this?
Powershell v5 ? ! ? Maybe ?? ! ?? ...still in preview? ..please?
Powershell v5 already is changing the windows world... SSH into powershell would not just change it, it would bring relevance back!
awesome! can't wait!
This is great news, as I'm using OpenBSD and PowerShell on a daily basis. But please consider donating to the OpenBSD project as there are lots of good stuff that were developed by the OpenBSD hackers.